Let your money do the talking when buying a football club

The very rich are different from you and me. They know when to shut up for a start. Usually it happens when there is business to be done. The very rich do not talk; they act. And if they buy a football club, the first anyone gets to hear of it is a snap on Sky Sports News.

When Colony Capital sold 70 per cent of Paris Saint-Germain to the Qatar Investment Authority in 2011, the initial statement did not even include the name of the buyer.

Roman Abramovich, Sheik Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan: both operated beneath the radar. On the day of the Manchester City takeover, Vicky Kloss, the club's head of communications, remembers phoning around frantically trying to find her equivalent in Abu Dhabi so she could prepare some information for the press.

For sale? If someone wanted Arsenal,
they certainly wouldn't tell you about it

Raising the stakes: Alisher Usmanov is one of the key players at Arsenal

She eventually discovered an agency in New York that issued Sheik Mansour's financial PR. They had never heard of Manchester City. They only got involved in deals above £500million, a helpful voice said. The last time they put out a statement was when the sheik bought the Chrysler building.

Even the Glazers' purchase of Manchester United came out of left field. The family had been buying shares for some time and there was speculation about a takeover in 2004 but by the time a move was made in May 2005, it was suspected the intention all along had been to cash in by selling to Cubic Expression, a rival shareholder group owned by John Magnier and JP McManus. Either way, the Glazers were not talking.

Similarly, when a takeover becomes a public saga it is rarely good news. The very rich don't spend several months haggling, either, or need additional time to come up with the funds. They don't care greatly about winning over the fans, and they don’t need a cast of thousands to get a deal over the line.

The proposed Red Knights buy-out of Manchester United ticked each one of those negative boxes. A blaze of empty fan-friendly rhetoric with no firm offer, a consortium of disparate individuals and early attempts at brinkmanship on the figures: they couldn't even get through the door.

So what to make of the speculation around Arsenal? A Middle East consortium from Qatar and the United Arab Emirates want to bid £1.5billion for the club, apparently. So why didn’t they just do it? Why involve the national newspapers?

If you had that money and a burning desire to own Arsenal, who would you tell: Stan Kroenke or The Sun? No wonder the current owners are not exactly leaping to embrace this unexpected windfall. These are tough times at Arsenal. They may be heading for their poorest season since 1995-96.

They will almost certainly finish below Tottenham Hotspur for the first time since 1994-95. The fans are angry; the criticism relentless. Even Arsene Wenger looks fatigued by it all. Had a gentleman arrived through the front door offering a way out with a profit of £400m, who knows what Kroenke’s reaction would have been? But this takeover does not deliver that.

To begin with, these are gentlemen, not a gentleman. This is a cross-border consortium deal involving Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Now business is business but in the Middle East business and government tend to have links and the Qataris and Emiratis do not always see eye-to-eye, particularly on the current issue of Qatar's support for the Muslim Brotherhood.

Blue is the colour: Abramovich has built his own empire at Stamford Bridge

Then there are matters of global profile. Sheik Mansour wants Abu Dhabi to be associated with a successful, well-run and respected football club in Manchester City. He may have only visited the stadium once, but it is every inch his project. The same with Abramovich at Chelsea. He doesn't want partners, but a benevolent dictatorship.

So why would men with hundreds of millions to invest in Arsenal wish to share the glory? If Alisher Usmanov could raise his 29.96 per cent stake in the club, he would not want Kroenke hanging around. Malcolm Glazer had no interest in consortium rule, either. What powerful man would?

With the exception of David Gold and David Sullivan at West Ham United, almost every Premier League club is either owned, or run, by one man. As the commotion around football grows, consortiums, even partnerships, become a battle of egos. Who are Arsenal’s suitors? How many are there? Are they strangers brought together by convenience or long-standing friends and business associates? Do they share exactly the same vision of the way forward?

David Dein was as good as married to Arsenal but a boardroom disagreement over long-term plans for the club forced him out. All we know of this takeover is some numbers in a headline; numbers that have not been called in as yet. Terry Venables and Alan Sugar looked a match made in heaven at Tottenham once. They ended up like weasels in a sack.

City slickers: The Manchester club have been transformed under Sheik Mansour

This is now the big sell but why would a buyer need one if the deal was so good? Sheik Mansour did not have to market his takeover, pre-purchase, nor did Abramovich. The very rich do not care for popularity contests, either; their product sells itself. Already this mooted Arsenal takeover smells different. Money for Kroenke, the debts cleared and subsidised tickets for the fans.

Yet if an offer seems too good to be true, it often is. UEFA's financial fair play rules make revenue streams vitally important. If Arsenal’s new owners wanted to let everybody in cheaply they couldn't, without it affecting spending potential. Acts of charity must be scaled down.

The buyers want a meeting with Kroenke, we read, once again in newspapers. And right there is the problem. Kroenke has a secretary. She has a telephone number. A very rich man should be able to unearth it, no problem. Why waste time with anyone else?

Michael deserves national service

The loss of Phil Jagielka for England’s matches with San Marino and Montenegro is unfortunate but not the gravest setback.

Another outstanding performance by Michael Dawson for Tottenham Hotspur on Sunday showed he is more than worthy of a first cap under Roy Hodgson. Dawson works best with Jan Vertonghen, clearly, but has formed several alliances at White Hart Lane this season and impressed each time.

His status as captain suggests leadership qualities, too. Dawson won four caps under Fabio Capello, the last against Wales almost two years ago. He has earned another chance.

Worthy contender: Dawson has been in fine form for Tottenham this season

Foster catches a very English disease

Ben Foster says he came out of international retirement because Roy Hodgson has made playing for England fun again.

Here we go. This is English football’s equivalent of the boom-and-bust cycle. We fail at a tournament, so we demand the opposite of the previous regime. Everything is wrong. Nothing was worthwhile. Steve McClaren’s team did not reach the 2008 European Championship and he was perceived as being too matey with the players, so we wanted a manager who would punish them instead: an austere regime with starvation rations and lights out at nine.

Then Fabio Capello made a hash of the 2010 World Cup and now we’ve swung the other way. Happy England, smiling England. And, lo and behold, West Bromwich Albion’s goalkeeper has agreed to come training again. Isn’t that lovely?

Boom and bust: Foster has made himself available for England selection once again

Capello used to talk about the steps up between the leagues. League One to Championship, one step, Championship to Premier League, two steps. Premier League to Champions League or England, six steps. And Foster was a Champions League goalkeeper, remember, at Manchester United. Now he’s at West Brom. He’s had a good season, but we should be realistic.

If Foster was at the standard that wins a World Cup, if he could comfortably climb those six steps between the Premier League and the very highest level, David de Gea would still be in Spain instead of at United.

So while it is good for England that he is back, it hardly makes Capello a poor judge. This is merely the latest exercise in revisionism. Don’t worry if you don’t like it. There will be another along in a couple of years.

And while we're at it...

Wolverhampton Wanderers could carry a wage bill of £25million into League One if they are relegated this season. Owner Steve Morgan has revealed there are no contract clauses that cut player salaries in the event of relegation.

Of course not. When Morgan stormed into the dressing room and began berating the team after a 3-0 defeat by Liverpool last year, it was the act of a man who thought he knew best. Certainly, he thought he knew more than Mick McCarthy, the manager he fatally undermined, and who was sacked soon after.

The disastrous appointment of Stale Solbakken following relegation was another clever-dick move that went awry. There are plenty of good, British coaches who could have steered a course for Wolves through the Championship but Morgan went with Solbakken, who has a good record in inferior Scandinavian leagues but set 1 FC Koln on course for relegation from the Bundesliga in his only job beyond the backwaters.

The reason there is no provision for third-tier football in Wolves’ grand design is that nobody at the club thought such a catastrophe possible. Morgan, and his chief executive Jez Moxey believed they were too smart. They were wrong.

Head over heels: Wolves continue to occupy a place near the bottom of the Championship

AVB still flopped

Tottenham Hotspur won, so it was another bad weekend for Chelsea’s senior players. Every time Andre Villas-Boas takes a step forward, it becomes a reason to rebuke those accused of undermining him at Stamford Bridge. The fact that Villas-Boas admits he has changed, and learned, since his previous job in English football is ignored. The easy line is that Villas-Boas’s insightful management was undone by player power.

This rather overlooks that Chelsea were a mess on the pitch when he left, and on the brink of going out of the Champions League, which they then won. It is possible for a manager to do a lousy job at one club, and a very good one at another. Brian Clough got it wrong at Leeds United. He didn’t at Nottingham Forest. Michael Laudrup is making a much better fist of managing Swansea City than he did of Spartak Moscow.

The most laughable concept of all is that Roman Abramovich was somehow badgered into sacking Villas-Boas. The story goes that he rounded on the players and snapped: ‘You made me do this.’ It would be believable if he had not sacked his way through five coaches already, including one who had lifted Chelsea’s first league title in 50 years, another who had lost the Champions League final on penalties and a third who did the Double. It would be a bit like a serial killer telling police: ‘The first nine bodies in the freezer: down to me — but that 10th one, I don’t even know how he got there.’

Moving on: AVB is enjoying far better fortunes at Tottenham than he did at Chelsea

Jeffrey Webb is the new head of FIFA’s anti-racism taskforce, so who does he want around the conference table? Lyon’s Nazis? Serbia’s football federation? Lazio’s fascist sympathisers? Maurizio Beretta, president of Serie A, the league that allows inflatable bananas to be sold outside grounds where Mario Balotelli is playing, and then fines him for making a vulgar gesture in reaction to abuse?

Don’t be silly. It’s John Terry and Luis Suarez, of course. Webb wants to exhume two incidents historic by close to 18 months and reopen them for discussion. He has already met Football Association chairman David Bernstein as if the English game is a festering pit of racial intolerance, rather than an environment that is so progressive it is possible to identify racist individuals in the crowd. Try to do that if the whole stand is making monkey chants.

The misjudged use of the N-word has just cost Paul Elliott his career. Elliott is black and a leading anti-racism campaigner. That is how hot English football is on racism. Terry and Suarez should stay where they are. The last thing this issue needs is another publicity stunt. If Webb is serious about tackling racism, he knows where to start.